Never again
by chaos child
Summary: A golden hedgehog with no memories sets out to discover who he is, but his past is dirty and entwined with many on mobius.
1. Power unleashed

This isn't my first fanfic, but it is my first ever sonic fanfic so please go easy on me if there is some accidental OC.

This whole fic is set in a combination of the sonic adventure universe and the freedom fighters universe as well as the old STC comics (anyone remember those?) universe. It may seem confusing at first, but look at it like this. All the events of STC comics issues 1-100 happen first, then in the time when Robotnik does not rule mobius there is the events of Sonic adventure 1&2, then Robotnik takes over again and we are left with the Freedom fighters (Knothole, Sally,Bunnie etc). I will try to provide details on characters I use from the comics, but if you still don't understand them tell me in a review and I'll add more details.

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters in this, they belong to Sega, apart from Jennifer, she's all mine.

***

The hedgehog with yellow-gold spines shot up in bed, cold sweat matting his fur, same as it does every night that he dreams. He could see a figure sitting at the foot of his bed. Jennifer was always there when he woke up from the nightmare, just sitting at the end of his bed looking at him.

"Wanna tell me about it?" She asked, she always asked the same question first, but his answer was always the same.

"No, I'm ok" 

She reached over to him and hugged him, same as always.

"Oh Goldie" she muttered. Goldie had become his name in the time he had been here, he couldn't remember his own. He had lost all of his memories prior to Robotnik's first, and unfortunately temporary fall from power. He had lost all of his memories, but the dreams he couldn't lose. The dream was always the same, it started with a blinding flash of light, he always likened it to the death of a star, but he never knew why. Then the voice would start, it was high pitched and demonic, it laughed at him, telling him he was worthless, that he was a mistake and it was time for him to die. As the voice stopped talking, its owner would emerge from the shadows, and it always looked the same.

Exactly like Goldie himself.

Jennifer had risked so much to look after him. He had wandered the streets for weeks and lived off of trash, that was until Robotnik took over again and people were afraid to do anything other than follow orders and toil in hellish factories for Robotnik's evil dictatorship. If it was found that she was harbouring someone who was of no use to the empire, both of them would be robotizized. He shuddered at the thought, he wouldn't let that happen to her, she had taken him in when no one else would and looked after him, she had helped him try to get his memories back, but nothing worked. They had one more lead to follow, and it was the most dangerous of all. They were going to seek out Knothole village, headquarters of the freedom fighters.

He just lay there for a moment , feeling the warmth of Jennifer against him. Then he asked a question that had been plaguing his mind.

"Jennifer" He started "Whywhy are you coming with me to find the freedom fighters?"

She pulled back from him and looked into his eyes, he was always astounded by how beautiful she was. She was a hedgehog like him, but her quills and fur were a deep red, almost verging on black, her eyes were amber and she could always stop him from saying anything just by smiling her wonderful smile.

"I mean you could get caughtget hurt" He continued

" So could you" she replied.

"We leave tomorrow, remember. Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked.

"I'm sure, I have to get away from this city, this.." she trailed off as her thoughts turned to the place they were living in, a place where SWATbots patrolled the streets, children were killed every day and the once great mobian sprit was crushed my the monster that was Robotnik.

***

Jennifer stood in the rain next to Goldie and shuddered with the cold. They were leaving the city of Metropolis and heading for the forest, but first they had to get out of the city, and that was the hardest part.

She stepped up to the guardbot, almost shaking with fear, comforted by the fact that Goldie stepped up next to her.

"Do you have the correct realise papers?" the guardbot asked in its mechanical voice. Jennifer pulled a wad of documents from inside her long cloak and handed them to it. Obtaining those papers had not been easy, but it had been done. They were false of course but the bot shouldn't realise until regional cross-checking was done, and that only happened once a month.

It handed the papers back to her and she let out a breath she did not know she had been holding, it then proceeded to scan her face, as was common procedure. The red light of the laser scanner passed over her face and she strained not to flinch at its touch. It finished scanning and moved to the side to scan Goldie.

Deep in the guardbot's mechanical brain, a link was made to the main database as it scanned this golden hedgehog's face, an alpha priority signal interrupted its scanning and one directive was passed into its programming.

CAPTURE SUBJECT ALIVE. TERMINATE ALL ACOMPLACES.

***

Goldie wondered what had happened as the guardbot stopped scanning his face halfway down, he thought it had malfunctioned. It suddenly sprang back to life and grabbed him by the arms pinning him to the wall behind him, another bot pulled its pistol from its holster and aimed it at Jennifer.

"No!" he screamed as the bot pulled the trigger and the bullet left the gun, speeding towards her.

It was all to much for him, the one being who had ever shown him kindness was about to die because of Robotnik's evil and , he rightly guessed, because of his unknown past.

His despair turned to anger greater than he had ever known and he could feel a voice pressing in on the back of his mind, it was the demon from his nightmares, but he wasn't laughing at him, he was offering help, in the form of power.

"Take it, save her" the demon seemed to say.

So he did, he felt something inside him spill open, like a damn holding back a flood. He ripped himself from the guardbot's grip, and sped towards the bullet, he was moving faster than sound, and he heard the demon's voice mingle with his own as he screamed out his rage. He caught the bullet just in front of Jennifer , he literally grabbed the slug with his fist. He turned to look at her and her mouth hung open , staring at him.

He launched himself at the bots, like a whirlwind of rage and hate he ripped then to pieces in mere seconds. He turned to Jennifer, as if to say "we need to go now" but he realised something, he could see fear in her eyes, fear of him and his power unleashed.

***

Hello author here, tell me if you like this or not, I really have to know, if you do like this then I will write more, I already know where I'm going to take the story line if I do continue but suggestions, comments, questions and even flames are welcome.


	2. Enter Zachary

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, I'm angry, why did no one review the first chapter of this? If I don't get any reviews this time then I'll probably stop writing this.

Disclaimer: I do not own sonic the hedgehog or any of the characters in this chapter (Zachary is not an OC, he does not belong to me).

Note: in the notes before the last chapter, I meant accidental OCC, not OC (how the hell can you have accidental OC?)

BLEEP_BEEEEEEEEP_BEEP_BEEEEEP

Zachary cursed the noise he could hear, his ears and god, roughly in that order. He stirred in bed and cursed as he heard it again.

BEEEEEP_BLEEP_BEEP_BEEEEP

He gave up on the slim chance that it might stop and decided he should probably get up. He pulled his bedcovers off and swung his feet over the side of the bed. His right eye opened first, he had learned he could open it a lot quicker than his other eye. He stood up and glanced at himself in the mirror, the sight would have made most Mobians shudder, but he was used to his horrific appearance.

He was still an Echidna, at least the parts that were not made of metal. His right arm was no longer an arm, it was an oily mass of wires and pistons up to the elbow joint, where it widened out into the smooth cylindrical barrel of a state-of-the-art machine gun. He had run out of ammunition for it a long time ago. Ironic that he couldn't make more because of having only one useable hand. The rest of his body was untouched by bionics, but his head was another matter entirely. The entire right side was metal, more smooth than his right arm, but still metal, even with metal dreadlocks, imitating the real, bone white dreadlocks on the other side of his head. His right eye though, was the most disturbing feature by far. The mechanical eye was a dark red and made soft whirring sounds as it moved. 

'Look at what I have become' Zachary thought to himself 'But without all this I would have died a long time ago.

Zachary thought back to the fall from the floating Island, the desperation as he fell thousands of feet and his relief when he managed to activate the wings of the robot Knuckles had decapitated, only to be followed by the fear when he saw one of the wings was broken. He could remember passing out as he fell and waking up in one of Robotnik's cells, his body restored with metal and wires in exchange for information on the whereabouts of the refugees hiding from Robotnik. 

BLEEEP_BEEP_BEEEEEEEEP

The sound that had woken him suddenly tore him away from his memories and he cursed again, wondering what that noise was coming from. He turned off all his machines for the night, apart from the proximity alert. It felt strange to have a proximity alert, but he knew it was needed, as well as the usual monsters wandering the wastes, he was hated by both Robotnik and the freedom fighters, so he couldn't take the risk of being found by either. 

BEEEP-BLEEEP-BLEEEEEEEEEP

That sound was defiantly not the proximity alert though, the alert didn't even make a sound, it was rigged to send a signal to the mechanical part of his brain, waking him in an instant. He looked around his small room, taking in the sight of so many machines. Zachary was still a scientist at heart and he had collected, made and stolen all types of machines and computers he could get his singe hand on. Then he saw it, right in the corner, a small read-out machine, about the size of a dishwasher and made of grey metal.

'That's not possible ' he thought, 'the machine has power but why on Mobius is it detecting something?' He mused to himself as he walked towards it.

He stood in front of it and stared down at it, his mechanical eye clicking as it focused on the screen.

'No' he thought 'that can't be'

The machine was old and he had stolen it from an abandoned freedom fighters hideout before the first defeat of Robotnik.

It was used to detect the location and power output from super sonic.

Years before the first defeat of Robotnik, sonic had absorbed too much of the chaos emeralds power and the energy within them had drove him almost insane. The product was his "super" form becoming a genocidal maniac and almost killing thousands of Mobians. The freedom fighters had managed to separate super sonic from sonic and unknowingly gave him his own body. All the reports and testimony from sonic himself had claimed that super sonic had perished shortly after causing the EMP which allowed the first defeat of Robotnik.

But the machine was happily bleeping away and Zachary couldn't believe his eyes, even if the robotic one was telling him the machine was not malfunctioning.

He had to tell someone, fast. He may have once worked alongside Robotnik, but Zachary did not betray anyone, and Robotnik had already sold him out to save his ass once. He may have been borderline evil, but he wasn't insane.

He knew how much damage super sonic could cause.

***

Goldie looked up at the tree canopy over his and Jennifer's heads. He had no idea how deep into the forest they were; they had found the edge of the trees two days ago and been travelling deeper since then. After the incident with the guardbots at the border of Metropolis city they had ran as fast as they could go, making sure that they weren't being followed.

Jennifer had started looking at him differently since they left the city. She would still comfort him after every nightmare in the same way she always had, it helped both of them, it was something they had done for years now, and it gave them a routine to cling to in the midst of such an immense change for both of them. He could see the difference in her eyes though, they held all the warmth and kindness they always had, but now they had the taint of fear in them. At first Goldie had just tried to convince himself that she was afraid of capture by the SWATbots, but later on he had to admit to himself.

She was afraid of him.

'Who wouldn't be.' He thought, he had torn through those bots armour like it was paper, he had displayed so much raw power and he knew that he had changed somehow when he used that power. He knew because the dreams were different.

Now he could see the demon clearly, it was almost identical to him except for its eyes. They were blood red and seemed to radiate hate and rage, the need to kill bleeding out from them and threatening to overwhelm him in a wave of evil. The demon would tell him he was less than nothing, a symptom of a disease, a lost soul, tears lost in the rain and it was time for him to die. This was not what woke Goldie in his familiar cold sweat; it was what the demon did next. It would hold up a head, the staring lifeless eyes and dark red quills telling him it was Jennifer. He would always awake to see the real Jennifer looking at him, her eyes full of life, replacing the eyes on the dream. He would still not tell her what he dreamt each night, he feared that if he told her, she would be disgusted in him, or her fear of him would worsen and she would leave one night while he slept.

***

Things had gone from bad to worse since they had reached the border of Knothole. They had been greeted all right at first and taken to see Princess Sally to be interrogated about why they were here and how they got here. They had been told that it was routine when new people arrived to be questioned and searched, to make sure they were not spies sent by Robotnik.

As they had been escorted through the village, people had stared at Goldie, he could see the fear in their eyes, much greater than the fear in Jennifer's.

As they had seen children point and adults stare, a number of figures had run forward and stared shouting.

Goldie turned to see them. 

"Get back from him" A female hedgehog with light pink quills shouted.

He realised she was speaking about him, as she shouted he could see the guards exchange worried looks.

"Just do it, you don't know how dangerous he is!" another voice shouted, this one was deeper, more masculine.

Goldie looked round to see him, and his mouth dropped open in surprise.

The Hedgehog looked exactly like him, but was blue instead of golden-yellow.

As they reached him, a number of others joined them, but Goldie didn't look at them, his gaze was fixed on one thing. The blue hedgehog had pulled Jennifer away by the arm and was standing as if to shield her from him. The blue hedgehog waved his hand and the guards stepped back. 

Goldie could feel the rage and power rising in him again. 

'How dare he touch her' his mind screamed 'how dare he stand like that'

The blue hedgehog aimed a punch at his head and Goldie felt it impact squarely with his jaw, he fell to the ground. Jennifer ran out from behind the hedgehog and knelt beside him. He was badly hurt, he couldn't remember being hit with such force before.

__

'Yeah you can, he's done it before, I can remember.'

It was the demon.

__

"He's just hit you, he has no right to hit you. KILL HIM!"

Goldie could feel the power building at the back of his mind, he stood up and stared into the blue hedgehog's eyes, his own brimming with hatred. This hedgehog wouldn't stand a chance against his power unleashed.

***

Please review, even if just to tell me how crap I am.

Oh yeah, did anyone notice the Blade Runner homage.


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